Chiasmus, peregrinations, ruminations, dilemmas

Friday, August 28, 2009

Let's begin by thinking of the temporality of the limit, the path between fields, for the limit is not tacked down but unfurls or advancesin a meaningful sense it consists of its own advance. The nature of its existence is existence, that is, the animate surpass, but much more can be said about it. We should want to know for instance whether the limit as such is necessarily schematicized. Schematicization is an aspect of embodiment, and if the limit were discovered to be a bodily phenomenon it should have this aspect. Things aren't so clear, however. We may know the limit bodily if not viscerally yet, as Morris says, "the body as a whole appears as a center of indeterminacy" (Sense, p. 66). The "body," not yet "my body," appears as the turning point of infinitions, as if the limit were, in order to be turned inside out, buried in the movements of the chiasm, earth and sprout. The limit must be passed through in order to be a limit. Such movements, infinitions, are schematicized, but the schema is not like a solid thing. It continuously arises from its own activation, autopoetically. The bodily schema, like Bergson's motor schema, is, to paraphrase Morris, a phenomenon of the limit, of chiasmic movement that (unlimitedly) limits itself (p. 67). The bodily schema unfolds in "real" time, as a limit, Morris insists (p. 69). In a sense then the limit becomes its asymptotic approach, the positioning of the telos that never quite arrives, a course of turns felt as the inhabitive cunicularity of styles of approach. The temporality of the cunicular leaps with studied suddenness, a leporine quality of both evasion and celebration, a novelty of approach; at the same time the world intrudes into the cunicular, earthy itself. The paradox of the leap: only in the leap does the earth becomes earth, take on its heaviness as earth. Earth as limit is turned inside out. Infinition reconfigures its own beyond, the repertoire of to/from structures native (as second nature) to existence within the leap. Says Morris, "The moving schema is already beyond itself, open to the world and development, ready to run into kinks that develop into new folds. The formation of such folds is a gross reorganization of body-world movement. . . that rearticulates our exploration and interaction with the world" (p. 70).